7 Steps to Effective Event Marketing

Event marketing is important for so many reasons, whether you have a product launch or want to create some buzz around your company, event marketing is pivotal to your success. We recommend thinking about how you can incorporate events into your business, because people are all about the experience. We probably have all heard someone say, “if you didn’t put it on Instagram, it didn’t happen,” and this both benefits your business, because your attendees will be sharing on social media, but it also creates an opportunity for your audience to get to know you and your product or service.

Because event marketing is so essential, there’s much more to it than simply spamming the date and times for your event all over social media. There are strategic ways to maximize the number of people who will see your event and be intrigued enough to attend. Putting in this work beforehand will be pivotal to your success and create an event that attendees will talk about long after.

1. Create Engaging Content Surrounding your event far in advance

One of the things that people always overlook is the content that will promote their event. Sometimes, this might be difficult if you’re putting on the very first installment of a particular series or this is your first event, but there are still ways you can work with that. You want to make sure that you have enough exciting, engaging, and shareable content to be able to capture viewers attention and offer them something valuable enough for them to leave their homes.

You can share content that has anything to do with your event that will give viewers a good idea of what they can expect at the event. Make sure to be specific and show the problem that you’re solving. You want to make sure that you have professional videos prepared if possible as well as high quality pictures and some well designed informational content like frequently asked questions. Use your content to answer any and all questions that may pop in people’s heads when they see a flyer for your event. (And if you need help, give us a call.)

2. Work within and outside your industry and professional network.

You may not be hosting a networking event, but networking should still be heavily involved in the marketing of your event. You always want to make sure to reach out to people in your field who would be interested in the main attraction. For example, if you’re hosting an event surrounding getting a community healthy you would want to make sure to reach out to other staples of the community such as public libraries, grocery stores, any mom and pop health food stores any and all gyms and fitness groups. Make your event beneficial to many overlapping and adjacent industries to attract more attendees.

3. Create a dedicated landing page or website

Creating a landing page or a fully dedicated website for an event gives it a sense of importance and permanence. You can create a page on your website, or use services such as Eventbrite. Don’t just throw out a link for people to click on that has a bunch of letters and numbers in it that’s hard to memorize, but instead pay $10-$15 for a domain for your event. It’s vital to create a sense of importance that a landing page or dedicated website will provide. On this landing page or website, you can post answers to frequently asked questions and show the viewers in more detail what they can expect to get out of attending the event. It’s also a great place to collect email addresses in order to use that information for an email blast to keep people who are interested updated on any changes, and any future events as well. Doing that will give you a very nice starting point for your next event.

4. Create a specific campaign including hashtags and geomarketing

While you’re preparing all of your media before your event actually occurs you can use that time to get together a list of powerful hashtags that you can use in conjunction with your event. Use a mix of popular hashtags and ones that are unique to your event. Doing that and having other people use that same hashtag will create a trend that you can use to obtain user-generated content as well as understand who specifically is talking about, reading about, or generally interested in the subject of your event.

To target attendees close to your event, it’s also important that when you’re paying for any ad space, that you utilize the geolocation function. Make sure that you hit areas immediately surrounding the location of the venue as well as areas that you think that your target market will reside.

5. Know Your Audience

I know I probably sound like a broken record but knowing your audience is of utmost importance. Knowing your audience and their interests and habits will help you to attract exactly who you’re looking for. Getting people up and out to an event is one of the most challenging things to do. However, if you do your homework correctly, you should know what strings to pull and exactly what to say in order to retain the attention of your audience and be compelling enough to make them take action. Doing this takes a lot of trial-and-error, and you need to see what your audience responds to the best. Be it videos, pictures, gifs, or any other type of content, look at your data and any analytics you get and see what does the best.

6. Live stream the event

I’m sure you’ve heard of FOMO or the fear of missing out. It’s important you create this for the people who did not attend your event. If possible have someone live stream your event or multiple people live stream your event to show different unique perspectives and dynamic experience. Doing this also gathers more user-generated content and takes the pressure off of you to create content that readily describes your event.

7. Post Event Marketing

Sticking with the FOMO theme, after the event, post recaps on SM, post photos and videos to dedicated webpage about the event to show people what they missed.

After the event has come and gone it’s important to gather all of that content to keep it in a safe space to continue to share it. This way, when you market future events, you’ll already be ahead of the game with your content. Use pictures, videos, and the other content that you’re able to get from your attendees to be able to extend the life of your campaign.

Remember our #GetStuffDoneConference? We’re experts at event marketing! We can help you plan, execute, and market a top-notch event for your business, so give us a call when you need a great events planning and marketing team!